Our Pacific Northwest Tour, PNWT (or as I like to call it, the P-Newt) has begun! We are currently in Crescent City and it is raining and 53 degrees. Our hike amongst a grove of old-growth coast redwoods in Redwood National Park today was an experience hard to put to words, but I’m going to try.
The hike started in second-growth Douglas Fir choked and cluttered with shrubs and saplings, and soon passed into old-growth redwood giants that soared razor-straight toward the heavens. I say heaven because it feels like being in a cathedral. Ferns littered the ground hiding carpets of clover underneath. Craning your neck to see the tops doesn’t help because the massive trunks, bare of branches for 100’, disappear into the canopy. The scale, both physical and chronological, is hard to fathom. How do you process the fact that a tree standing in front of you, healthy and still growing, was there when the Aztec and Mayan kingdoms were flourishing? How to grasp the fact that when Columbus landed in the New World, he could have come here and stood and gazed at these very same trees? There is no way to do it. There is no way to wrap your head around the seeming immortality of these trees. We seem so insignificant in comparison that I stand in total awe and even a little fear. These forests could be on a different planet for all I care. They feel otherworldly.
It was wet and muddy and we squelched our way down the trail reading the different interpretive signs from the NPS app on my phone. We learned that redwoods germinate from seeds that come from pine cones the size of olives. Find a loblolly in South Carolina and you’ll have a tree a quarter the size with pine cones four times the size.
Coastal redwoods run in a ribbon from a creek in Big Sur to a creek just a few miles into southern Oregon. They stop there. The coast redwoods get 40% of the moisture they need from fog. They thrive in the alluvial fans of the creeks in the valley bottoms. The biggest ones are called giants or titans. Those terms suit them. When they reach a certain age or height they lose their tops. Sometimes a good 30’ will die and fall from their top. The biggest one, which when discovered in the 60’s helped found the national park, was the Libby Tree or the Tall Tree and stood an astounding 370’. Eventually it lost its top and now the tallest one is called Hyperion and access to it is restricted by the National Park Service.
Tomorrow we plan to explore some more groves and hopefully find some titans.
Technically speaking, a forest has to get 80”, give or take, of rain to be called a rainforest, many parts of the Coast Ranges in northern CA get more. These rainforests are just what I would expect. Everything drips with moss and the fog-enshrouded understory creates a dim otherworld. The sun can’t penetrate the dense redwood canopy, once considered a realm dead of life except for the branches and needles of the tree are now considered almost barrier reef-life areas teeming with life. Botanists find honeysuckle flourishing within the canopy and treat themselves to the berries as they climb the 300’ sometimes necessary to reach the highest levels of the biggest redwoods.
Most people consider the Giant Sequoia to be the largest living individual organisms on the planet, but botanists have found coast redwoods with more mass than sequoias. The General Sherman, a Giant Sequoia, is the largest individual organism currently alive on the planet. However, there are many coast redwoods that are 100’ taller than the General. And some historical evidence shows that a particular tree that was logged in the late 19th century, the Crannell Giant, contained more cubic feet of wood than the General Sherman.
Getting back to more mundane matters, we left the camper in the Bay Area at a storage facility that was almost impossible to navigate. How I didn’t scratch the camper I will never know…nor how I didn’t lose my mind as I was forced, with my 34’ trailer, into a comical, Austin Powers-style 30-point turn.
It feels weird to be without it and there have been a few occasions since we left it that we’ve wondered if it was the right decision. But we never would have driven Route 1 into, and out of, Fort Bragg. We wouldn’t have driven the Avenue of the Giants and visited a drive thru tree (Tahoes don’t fit). We wouldn’t have pulled into a scenic vista overlook near Rockport to see the view along Route 1 and eventually gotten into a talk with an old, crusty Northwesterner about whales. And we wouldn’t have stopped at Moonstone Beach near Trinidad to climb the jagged rocks rising out of the soft sand and watch brave souls surf in the 55 degree water.
So while leaving the camper behind feels somewhat off at times, it also feels great to be able to go wherever we want whenever we want.
Wendy and I made a cup of coffee and tea at the trailhead on the tailgate today after our rainy day hike in the redwoods while the girls changed into dry shoes. We sipped our hot drinks in the misty air and it felt like a good old-fashioned, old-school road trip.
Cram the box of food in with the cooler and the rain jackets and the backpacks and the muddy shoes and the new scooter so we can close the hatch and get back on the road!
